Research: Men Get Credit for Voicing Ideas, but Not Problems. Women Don’t Get Credit for Either

Executive Summary

Employee voice, or speaking up with information intended to help one’s group, can improve performance, help teams come up with creative solutions, and avoid issues that might hold them back. But new research finds that speaking up only benefits men, and only when they speak up to offer ideas rather than point out problems. The author found that women were not helped by speaking up, regardless of whether it was about ideas or problems. Managers should make a specific effort to encourage women to speak up, taking care to show female employees that their contributions are valued. The author offers a number of ways to do that, including amplifying women’s ideas, making sure women get credit for their contributions, and making a point to call on female employees to hear their thoughts.

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Employee voice, or speaking up with information intended to help one’s group, has tons of well-recognized benefits. It can improve performance, help teams come up with creative solutions, and avoid issues that might hold them back. A lotofresearch suggests that those who speak the most in groups tend to emerge as leaders.

But does it matter who speaks up, or how they do it? In a forthcoming article in Academy of Management Journal, my colleagues Elizabeth McClean, Kyle Emich, and Todd Woodruff and I share how we explored these questions in two studies. We found that those who speak up can gain the respect and esteem of their peers, and that increase in status made people more likely to emerge as leaders of their groups — but these effects happened only for some people and only when they spoke up in certain ways. Specifically, speaking up with promotive voice (providing ideas for improving the group) was significantly related to gaining status among one’s peers and emerging as a leader. However, speaking up with prohibitive voice (pointing out problems or issues that may be harming the team and should be stopped) was not. We further found that the gender of the person speaking up was an important consideration: The status bump and leader emergence that resulted from speaking up with ideas only happened for men, not for women.

Our first study was of cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point. Every year, cadets spend about four months training in teams to prepare for a two-day competition of simulated war games. During the training period we sent them several surveys. Our first survey, sent a couple of weeks into their training, collected basic demographic information as well as a measure of the extent to which they spoke up in their groups to offer ideas and point out problems. In the second survey, sent about 10 days prior to the competition, peers evaluated how much status they perceived each member of their team to have in the group; we used this information to calculate each individual’s statusscore. We measured individuals’ leader emergence score with a final survey that was sent immediately after the competition ended, asking the cadets to rank their teammates in terms of who they would want to lead their team if they had to do the competition again.

In our second study, we recruited 196 Master Workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk through an online post requesting participants for an academic study about group dynamics. The average age of our participants was 39, they had an average of 15.6 years of work experience, and 38% were women. Participants responded to some questions about their demographics, and then read a short vignette asking them to imagine that they worked in a group selling insurance plans over the phone and that the process the group had for selling the plans was ineffective. They were asked to imagine that, in a meeting with the group’s boss, one of their peers decided to speak up about the ineffective process.

Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions, in which they listened to an audio recording of (1) a man speaking up with an idea for improving the process, (2) a woman speaking up with an idea for improving the process, (3) a man pointing out a problem with the process, or (4) a woman pointing out a problem with the process. Participants then rated how much status they perceived the speaker to have in the group and answered several questions about how effective the speaker was in influencing the team (a common method of assessing leadership emergence).

Across both studies—using both field and experimental research designs and very different populations of respondents—we saw the same pattern of results: Men who spoke up with ideas were seen as having higher status and were more likely to emerge as leaders. Women did not receive any benefits in status or leader emergence from speaking up, regardless of whether they did so promotively or prohibitively. Neither men nor women who spoke up about problems suffered a loss of status or had a lower likelihood of emerging as a leader (though they weren’t helped by speaking up, either). Also of note, men and women both ascribed more status and leadership emergence to men who spoke up promotively, compared with women who did so.

Our findings complement several research areas while raising questions about what behaviors are best for helping one’s group and what behaviors are best for helping one’s standing in that group. Numerous studies suggest that speaking up in a group should relate to emerging as a leader or gaining status. Ours suggests that it is more complicated than just speaking up—it also matters who you are and what you say. Similarly, our work, echoing research showing that people respond differently when men and women engage in similar behaviors, suggests that women who speak up and share ideas may not see the same benefits as men.

Importantly, this research is not intended to suggest that people — men or women — should speak up only with ideas and avoid bringing up problems. After all, for teams to function, innovate, and learn, it is critically important to have new ideas and to spot the things that be might holding a team back from even better outcomes. Our work suggests that the social outcomes for those who speak up depend on how they choose to speak up and on their gender. This pattern of results across our studies highlights that we still have a way to go until men’s and women’s contributions to groups are evaluated in more objective terms.

Managers who want to promote gender equity on their team — or who just want to make sure they are getting as many good suggestions from their team members as possible — will have to proactively work to counteract the tendencies uncovered in our research. After all, one interpretation of this study is that women, even when they speak up and “lean in,” still may not get equal credit for doing so. And if that is the case, then it is essential not only for women to speak up but also for those around them to give equal weight to what they say.

One way to address this challenge would be for managers to amplify women’s ideas by intentionally giving extra attention to their suggestions. After all, if our natural tendency is to give less recognition to women’s ideas, then we will need to make an extra effort to overcome this bias. And given that women are interrupted more often than men are when speaking up in groups, we suggest managers be vigilant about ensuring that equal respect is shown to women when they are voicing their ideas.

Another approach is to document ideas in real time in order to ensure appropriate credit and recognition is given to each one. Some simple ways to do this would be to write ideas on a whiteboard and note whose idea it is, or to have an email folder for suggestions where people’s ideas can be saved electronically.

Lastly, managers should make it a point to call on women in meetings to hear their input, or to find less formal contexts to ask for women’s improvement-oriented suggestions. These recommendations may also help address another longstanding issue regarding women and voice: that women tend to speak up less in mixed-gender settings. By taking these steps, managers can signal that they value women’s ideas and help ensure equity of outcomes when women speak up, as well as show female employees that their contributions are valued. We encourage others — practitioners and researchers alike — to explore more ways to ensure that people garner the same levels of respect and are evaluated fairly for the same behaviors, regardless of gender.

Sean R. Martin (sean.martin.4@bc.edu) is an Assistant Professor of Management in the Carroll School of Management at Boston College. He received his Ph.D. in Management from Cornell University. His research interests include leadership and values, and how past and present contexts influence these factors.